Management software in virtualized environments is used to monitor hardware resources, such as host systems, storage arrays, and virtual machines (VMs) running in the host systems. The management software also enables resource management operations such as placement of VMs and load balancing across the host systems. One example of such management software is vSphere™ by VMware, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.
Existing resource management solutions are optimized to execute efficiently in a virtualized computing system that includes a small number of hardware resources. When the number of hardware resources included in the virtualized computing system becomes very large, such solutions do not scale well and the management thereof becomes quite inefficient. For example, a cloud-based computing system includes thousands of hardware resources that provide the physical infrastructure for a large number of different computing operations. In such cloud-based computing systems, proper initial placement and load balancing across the hardware resources is critical to avoid computing bottlenecks that can result in serious problems including a reduction in speed of VMs executing on a host system that is overloaded, potential data loss when no more free space is available in a storage array, and the like. Unfortunately, the complexity and inefficiency of load balancing scales with the number of hardware resources that are involved.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a technique for providing an efficient way to manage a large number of hardware resources.